Federal Justice Minister Marco Buschmann (FDP) has categorically opposed a draft law by Federal Interior Minister Nancy Fesser (SPD), according to which the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) should be able to secretly enter and search apartments and install state trojans. “There will be no power to secretly peer into homes,” he clarified on social networks. “No plans” in this direction will be implemented. The liberal stressed: “In the event of the basic law, we do not do anything like that. That would be a complete violation of the taboo.”
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FDP internal expert Manuel Höferlin previously warned against excessively severe interference with fundamental rights: “The secrecy of the search in particular makes the project difficult, because the Free Democrats do not stand for a Stasi 2.0.” Law enforcement officials need “appropriate and robust investigative tools”, but these must be “well thought out.” Otherwise, the constitutional state, which has to protect the freedom of all citizens, will collapse on itself. Criminal lawyer Alexandra Braun said that secret state interference in the constitutional state should be the absolute exception and requires very good reasons. It is to be feared that today it is about potential terrorists, “tomorrow maybe about suspects in cases of abuse.”
Above all, Fesser wanted to make it easier for the BKA to install Federal Trojans or other spy software on IT systems such as smartphones or computers for covert online searches and source telecommunications surveillance. According to the draft justification the BKA should be able to “physically affect IT equipment” Netzpolitik.org has now published. This is the “technically safest and fastest way” to implement such spying programs “without the involvement of the target person”.
Facial recognition and big data analysis are still open
In 2020, the Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania state parliament did not refrain from violating the taboo that Buschmann complained about. At that time, with the votes of the government factions of the SPD and CDU as well as the opposition AfD, they decided to reform the police law, including a “right of entry” for law enforcement officers to prepare online searches. Before Feser, his predecessors Horst Seehofer (CSU) and Wolfgang Schäuble (CDU) had also made relevant suggestions.
It is unclear what will happen with other projects from the Faser draft, which have not yet been coordinated within the federal government. For example, federal and state police should be allowed to make “biometric comparisons with publicly accessible data from the Internet” when searching for suspected terrorists and serious criminals. According to the newspaper, this applies not only to suspects, but also to “contact persons, victims and witnesses”. In addition to facial photographs, automatic identification should include other identifying features such as “movement, action or speech patterns”. This project also contradicts the coalition agreement. The interior minister also wants to allow the police to technically combine “various data sets” for big data analysis and thus generate “new knowledge”. The Federal Constitutional Court declared the use of automatic data analysis by prosecutors in Hesse and Hamburg unconstitutional in 2023.
(MKI)
